I spent the day at Dell Computer recently and found the company busy with new products and service offerings. You could forgive Dell officials for being blase about success, but even they have been surprised by the impact of the company’s EMC relationship. Darren Thomas, head of Dell’s storage group, said the company is constantly changing and expanding the terms of their now three-year-old relationship because it has provided both companies with new opportunities. If you don’t recall, Dell and EMC have a co-branding and co-development agreement for several low-end storage products. Proving that relationships matter, EMC’s president and CEO Joe Tucci was formerly head of Wang Computer, which provided service and support for Dell products during the 1990s. When Tucci went to EMC, Michael Dell kept in touch. Thomas says Dell is learning a great deal about the storage needs of customers, while EMC is learning about making products that are more customer friendly. The most recent product to result from the agreement is the AX/100, which has been described as “SAN in a box.” Designed for simplicity, it takes four mouse clicks to set up, said Thomas. That has proven a boon to Dell customers, particularly to Dell’s small and medium business customers with small or no IT departments. Dell is eager to expand the concept, said Terry Klein, vice president of Dell’s advanced systems group. “If we take what we’ve learned with the AX/100 and take it to larger storage systems, we’ll really have a winner. It may take 20 clicks instead of four, but that’s good, very good compared to other products on the market,” he said. I’ll never forget my first visit to Dell Computer. It was sometime around 1990 and I had read and heard a bit about Dell and their computers. I called them up and was invited down to take a look (yes, reporters do have hunches, though truthfully I also visited more than a few flash-in-the-pan PC vendors at the time). Even though the magazine I was working for was skeptical about PCs (even calling them “pcs”), I went. The affable marketing guy, Brian, took me to a room and showed me their latest computers, which had just been renamed Dell, after dropping the PC’s Limited brand name (with good reason and foresight as it turned out). As Brian went through the products, a young man entered the room and stood quietly to the side. I assumed he was an engineer waiting to answer any questions. Indeed, when I asked a technical question, the young man stepped forward and patiently explained the technical point. He continued talking and explaining the technology, products and customer needs until finally he introduced himself as Michael Dell. He was as enthusiastic about his products then as the company leaders seem to be now, nearly, gulp, 15 years or so later. Technology Industry